On the morning of his 42nd birthday, Stephen Harrell was arrested outside a liquor store on Century Boulevard in Inglewood, handcuffed, and hauled off to face the screwiest charge ever leveled at him in his admittedly checkered career with the criminal justice system. He was accused of concealing four rocks of cocaine in his foreskin. To be more precise, he was accused of wrapping the rocks in individual clear plastic bags, placing them all in another black bag, shoving them halfway up his penis and then keeping them snugly in place for at least an hour between the time of his arrest and the time that three Inglewood cops strip-searched him. The whole package was variously described by the arresting officer as being "bigger than a marble" and having roughly the same diameter as a dime.

Let me point out to those of you unendowed with male genitalia that we are talking about an almost unfathomable world of pain here, not to mention physical elasticity of a truly extraordinary kind. (Those of you with male genitalia have probably crossed your legs already.) Nothing in Harrell's long resume as a petty criminal and drug user suggests he was ever in serious contention for the cast of Puppetry of the Penis. Or, as Harrell himself put it in one of his first interviews with his defense attorney: "I may be big, but I ain't no horse." So far, just a funny story. But it only gets more bizarre on closer examination. The arresting officer, Patrick Manning, claims he saw Harrell drop a crack pipe from his waistband as soon as he became aware of his patrol car. That, at least, was the pretext for the arrest. But Harrell didn't apparently think of dumping the cocaine – assuming he ever had it in the first place. Officer Manning noticed nothing unusual about the way Harrell was walking, and once he had cuffed him and put him in the patrol car he didn't report any wriggling or gasps of pain.

The public defender eventually assigned to Harrell, Eleanor Schneir, had the bright idea of downloading some penis diagrams off the Internet and asked Officer Manning and the two colleagues he took with him into the strip-search room to show the trial jury where exactly the bulge had been. Curiously, each policeman put it in a different place. One said it was at the top, beneath the foreskin proper, while the other two put it further down and to the side. In one diagram the package was almost all the way to the base of the penis – which makes one wonder just how endowed with male genitalia the police officers themselves can have been. Schneir had great fun buying up gourmet gumballs from her local grocery store and waving them at the jury, with a dime taped to the side for size-comparison purposes, just to emphasize the preposterousness of the allegation. She cited no less an authority than Seinfeld to question whether any penis could withstand the cold of the strip-search room without succumbing to the dreaded male problem of shrinkage, which would surely have shaken the incriminating package loose all by itself.

At a certain point, it seemed Harrell was home free, and Schneir was confident enough to berate the prosecution for subjecting him to an embarrassing public spectacle. As she told the jury: "He has to sit here and hear me, his lawyer, his advocate, a woman, argue to a jury of 12 strangers that his penis is too small for this to be possible – what could possibly be more humiliating than that?" Things took an unexpected turn, however, as a batch of photographs of Harrell's genitalia was released to the court and appeared to show that he was circumcised. From Harrell's point of view, this might have looked like a pretty good defense – how, after all, can anyone conceal drugs in their foreskin if they don't have one? In reality, though, the photographs unleashed a furor in the courtroom and changed the terms of the debate entirely. Suddenly, it was not the Inglewood PD whose honesty was under scrutiny but rather Harrell's, as the defendant was accused of yanking his foreskin back for the camera in an attempt to conceal it.

In the single most surreal sequence of the trial, Officer Manning bragged that he knew all about the flexibility of uncircumcised penises because he used to play baseball for the Atlanta Braves (he was a 1999 draft pick later sidelined by a knee injury) and frequently showered with players from Colombia and Central America who not only had foreskins but were frequently "silly" with them. Manning told the prosecutor he saw players pull down their foreskins and dance around for as long as 20 minutes. Schneir wasn't going to let this one go. "I'm a little confused," she said disingenuously. "I was always led to believe that men in showers go to great lengths not to look at each other's penises, and you're telling me you looked for 20 minutes?"

Members of the jury started guffawing. Manning said sheepishly that he hadn't exactly looked for 20 minutes. So Schneir asked him how long he had looked for – 15 minutes, 10 minutes, 5 minutes? Eventually, Manning said he’d looked at one penis for one minute. Schneir deadpanned: "Okay, we're all dying to know: whose penis was it?" For all the courtroom humor, from here on out the trial started slipping out of the grasp of the defense. The deputy district attorney suggested the only way to resolve the circumcision question was to have Harrell re-examined by a medical professional. Harrell told the court he'd had quite enough people looking at his penis and refused. The judge, Deirdre Hill, then instructed the jury that they were free to interpret this refusal as a form of self-incrimination. Schneir tried valiantly to argue that the circumcision question made no difference to the plausibility of the police's story. But the damage was done, and the jury came back with a guilty verdict.

That, of course, is the way so many petty crime cases go. Given the choice between a defendant of dubious character and the testimony of uniformed police officers, juries will almost always side with the police. The Harrell case reflects many of the uglier aspects of law enforcement in Los Angeles: a poor, black, relatively harmless delinquent picked up, handcuffed and stripped by white officers, and lumbered with a serious felony charge for which he has just been sentenced to six years and six months behind bars. Without the allegation of cocaine in his penis, he would have been looking at a misdemeanor and a $100 fine. There is some evidence to suggest that Officer Manning, for one, finds escapades like the apprehension of Stephen Harrell to be a bit of a hoot. Interviewed by a Myrtle Beach, South Carolina newspaper when he first made the leap from baseball to policing, he said patrolling the streets of Inglewood was not entirely unlike competitive sports. "To me, it's almost like a game," he said. "I've had a great time so far."

CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. (AP) — One of the largest military drug investigations in recent years has led to the conviction of 84 enlisted Marines and sailors at Camp Lejeune. The troops were busted for using and selling Ecstasy, cocaine, LSD and methamphetamine. The Marines and sailors, along with 99 civilians, were arrested in a two-year undercover investigation that also resulted in the seizure of more than $1.4 million worth of drugs. All of the convicted troops received dishonorable discharges and confinement ranging from 3-19 years, said Special Agent Robin Knapp of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

The investigation began in February 2000 after Camp Lejeune officials learned that a large number of service members were frequenting clubs where designer drugs were prevalent in Wilmington, about 40 miles south of the base. Arrests were made at the base, in nearby Onslow and New Hanover counties and in Wilmington. Drug charges were filed against 84 active-duty service members, none of them officers. 61 were accused of distributing drugs and 23 were accused of using them. All but two were convicted in military court, Knapp said. Code-named Operation Xterminator, the investigation was conducted by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service office, along with state and local authorities. Knapp called the arrests "significant" but not extraordinary. "This is not unique. This is what we do for a living," Knapp said.

Base spokesman Maj. Steve Cox said the 84 people involved make up a fraction of the 50,000 to 60,000 active-duty personnel at the sprawling coastal base. "That's 0.001% of the forces at Camp Lejeune. It's not an epidemic by any means," he said. "From a Marine Corps perspective, we view drug use as a societal issue. We would be naive to think our Marines are not using drugs." Although narcotics cases in the military are not rare, they usually involve smaller numbers of people. 38 cadets out of 4,300 at the Air Force Academy were implicated in a rash of incidents that began in December 2000 and grew to become the biggest drug scandal in the school's 47-year history. A 1996 case at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., included 5 midshipmen court-martialed and jailed on drug charges and the expulsion of 15 others.

[...] (Karl H. Pribram is an emeritus professor of psychology and psychiatry at Stanford University and Radford University. Board-certified as a neurosurgeon, Pribram did pioneering work on the definition of the limbic system, the relationship of the frontal cortex to the limbic system, the sensory-specific "association" cortex of the parietal and temporal lobes, and the classical motor cortex of the human brain.) Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions. Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions.

But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram’s holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm’s theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is “there” is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality? Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion. We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.

[...]

[...]

In 1973, what has come to be known as the Pribram-Bohm Holographic Model was non-existent. But the Seattle think tank, Organization for the Advancement of Knowledge (OAK), lead by Richard Alan Miller and Burt Webb were able to synthesize the work of Northrup and Burr on the electromagnetic nature of the human being with Dennis Gabor's work on optical holograms and come up with a new notion – a holographic paradigm. In "Languages of the Brain" (1971), Pribram had postulated that 2-dimensional interference patterns, physical holograms, underlie all thinking. The holographic component, for him, represented the associative mechanisms and contributed to memory retrieval and storage and problem solving.

[...]

That it is feasible to manipulate human behavior with the use of subliminal, either sound or visual, messages is now generally known. This is why in most of the countries the use of such technologies, without consent of the user, is banned. Devices using light for the stimulation of the brain show another way how the light flashing in certain frequencies could be used for the manipulation of human psychic life. As for the sound, a report on the device transmitting a beam of sound waves, which can hear only persons at whom the beam of sound waves is targeted, appeared last year in the world newspapers. The beam is formed by a combination of sound and ultrasound waves which causes that a person targeted by this beam hears the sound inside of his head. Such a perception could easily convince the human being that it is mentally ill. The acts presented in this article suggest that with the development of technology and knowledge of the functioning of human brain new ways of manipulation of human mind keep emerging. One of them seems to be the electromagnetic energy.

In the book "Psychotronic Weapon and the Security of Russia" the authors propose among the basic principles of the Russian concept of the defense against the remote control of human psyche the acknowledgement of its factual existence as well as the acknowledgement of realistic feasibility of informational, psychotronic war (which as a matter of fact is actually taking place without declaration of war)" They quote as well the record from the session of the Russian Federation Federal Council where V. Lopatin stated that psychotronic weapon can "cause the blocking of the freedom of will of a human being on a subliminal level" or "instillation into the consciousness or subconsciousness of a human being of information which will cause faulty perception of the reality." For that matter they propose the preparation of national legislative as well as the norms of international law "aimed at the defense of human psyche against subliminal, destructive, informational effects." As well they propose the declassificcation of all works on this technology and warn that, as a consequence of the classification, the arms race is speeding up making the psychotronic war probable. Among the possible sources of remote influence on human psyche they list the generators of physical fields" of "known as well as unknown nature."

In 1999 the STOA (Scientific and Technological Options Assessment), part of the Directorate General for Research of the European Parliament published the report on Crowd Control Technologies, ordered by them with the OMEGA foundation in British Manchester. One of four major subjects of the study are the 2nd generation" or "non lethal" technologies: "This report evaluates the second generation of 'non-lethal' weapons which are emerging from national military and nuclear weapons laboratories in the United States as part of the Clinton Administration's 'non-lethal' warfare doctrine now adopted in turn by NATO. These devices include weapons using directed energy beam,radiorequency, laser and accoustic mechanisms to incapacitate human targets." The report states that the most controversial non-lethal' crowd control technology proposed by the U.S., are so called Radio Frequency or Directed Energy Weapons that can allegedly manipulate human behavior the greatest concern is with systems which can directly interact with the human nervous system." The report also states that perhaps the most powerful developments remain shrouded in secrecy." The unavailability of offical documents confirming the existence of this technology may be the reason why the OMEGA report is referencing, with respect to mind control technology, the internet publication of the author of this article. In an identical approach the internet publication of the directrice of the American human rights and anti mind control organization (CAHRA), Cheryl Welsh, is referenced by joint initiative of Quaker United Nations Office, United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, and Programme for Strategic and International Security Studies, with respect to non-lethal weapons.

Concrete evidence that electronic mind control was the true object of study at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) was exposed by the Washington Post in 1977. When the Navy awarded a contract to the Institute, "the scientific assistant to the Secretary of the Navy, Dr. Sam Koslov, received a routine briefing on various research projects, including SRI's. As the briefer flashed his chart onto the screen and began to speak, Koslov stormily interrupted, 'What the hell is that about?' Among the glowing words on the projected chart, the section describing SRI's work was labeled

'ELF and Mind Control.'

"'ELF' stands for 'extremely long frequency' electromagnetic waves, from the very slow brain frequencies up to about 100 cycles per second.... But the 'Mind Control' label really upset Koslov. He ordered the SRI investigations for the Navy stopped, and canceled another $35,000 in Navy funds slated for more remote viewing work." Contrary to Koslov's attempt to kill the research, the Navy quietly continued to fork out $100,000 for a two-year project directed by a bionics specialist. The "remote viewing" team at SRI was really engaged in projecting words and images directly to the cranium. It was not a humanitarian pastime: the project was military and test subjects are subjected to a lifetime of EM torture plied with the same thorough disregard for human rights as the radiation tests conducted at the height of the Cold War. To be sure, the treatment subjects have received at the hands of their own government would be considered atrocities if practiced in wartime.

Mind control was also used in domestic covert operations designed to further the CIA's heady ambitions, and during the Vietnam War period SRI was a hive of covert political subterfuge. The Symbionese Liberation Army, like the People's Temple, was a creation of the CIA. The SLA had at its core a clique of black ex-convicts from Vacaville Prison. Donald DeFreeze, otherwise known as "Cinque," led the SLA. He was formerly an informant for the LAPD's Criminal Conspiracy Section and the director of Vacaville's Black Cultural Association (BCA), a covert mind control unit with funding from the CIA channeled through SRI. The Menlo Park behavior modification specialists experimented with psychoactive drugs administered to members of the BCA. Black prisoners were programmed to murder selected black leaders once on the outside. The CIA/SRI zombie killer hit list included Oakland school superintendent Dr. Marcus Foster, and Panthers Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, among others. DeFreeze stated that at Vacaville in 1971-72, he was the subject of a CIA mind control experiment. He described his incarceration on the prison's third floor, where he was corralled by CIA agents who drugged him and said he would become the leader of a radical movement and kidnap a wealthy person. After his escape from Vacaville (an exit door was left unlocked for him), that's exactly what he did.

EM mind control machines were championed at SRI by Dr. Karl Pribram, director of the Neurophychology Research Laboratory: "I certainly could educate a child by putting an electrode in the lateral hypothalmus and then selecting the situations at which I stimulate it. In this was I can grossly change his behavior." Psychology Today touted Pribram as "The Magellan of Brain Science." He obtained his B.S. and M.D. degrees at the University of Chicago, and at SRI studied how the brain processes and stores sensory imagery. He is credited with discovering that mental imaging bears a close resemblance to hologram projection (the basis for transmitting images to the brains of test subjects under the misnomer "remote viewing"?). The SRI/SAIC psi experiments were supervised at Langley by John McMahon, second in command under William Casey, succeeding Bobby Ray Inman, the SAIC director. McMahon has, according to Philip Agee, the CIA whistle-blowing exile, an affinity for "technological exotics for CIA covert actions." He was recruited by the Agency after his graduation from Holy Cross College. He is a former director of the Technical Services Division, deputy director for Operations, and in 1982 McMahon was appointed deputy director of Central Intelligence. He left the Agency six years later to take the position of president of the Lockheed Missiles and Space Systems Group. In 1994 he moved on the Draper Laboratories. He is a director of the Defense Enterprise Fund and an adviser to congressional committees.

Many of the SRI "empaths" were mustered from L. Ron Hubbard's Church of Scientology, Harold Puthoff, the Institute's senior researcher, is a leading Scientologist. Two "remote viewers" from SRI have also held rank in the Church: Ingo Swann, a Class VII Operating Thetan, a founder of the Scientology Center in Los Angeles, and the late Pat Price. Puthoff and Targ's lab assistant was a Scientologist married to a minister of the church. When Swann joined SRI, he stated openly that fourteen "Clears" participated in the experiments, "more than I would suspect." At the time he denied CIA involvement, but now acknowledges, "it was rather common knowledge all along who the sponsor was, although in documents the identity of the Agency was concealed behind the sobriquet of 'an east-coast scientist.' The Agency's interest was quite extensive. A number of agents of the CIA came themselves ultimately to SRI to act as subjects in "remote viewing" experiments, as did some members of Congress."

Concrete evidence that electronic mind control was the true object of study at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) was exposed by the Washington Post in 1977. When the Navy awarded a contract to the Institute, "the scientific assistant to the Secretary of the Navy, Dr. Sam Koslov, received a routine briefing on various research projects, including SRI's. As the briefer flashed his chart onto the screen and began to speak, Koslov stormily interrupted, 'What the hell is that about?' Among the glowing words on the projected chart, the section describing SRI's work was labeled

'ELF and Mind Control.'

"'ELF' stands for 'extremely long frequency' electromagnetic waves, from the very slow brain frequencies up to about 100 cycles per second.... But the 'Mind Control' label really upset Koslov. He ordered the SRI investigations for the Navy stopped, and canceled another $35,000 in Navy funds slated for more remote viewing work." Contrary to Koslov's attempt to kill the research, the Navy quietly continued to fork out $100,000 for a two-year project directed by a bionics specialist. The "remote viewing" team at SRI was really engaged in projecting words and images directly to the cranium. It was not a humanitarian pastime: the project was military and test subjects are subjected to a lifetime of EM torture plied with the same thorough disregard for human rights as the radiation tests conducted at the height of the Cold War. To be sure, the treatment subjects have received at the hands of their own government would be considered atrocities if practiced in wartime.

Mind control was also used in domestic covert operations designed to further the CIA's heady ambitions, and during the Vietnam War period SRI was a hive of covert political subterfuge. The Symbionese Liberation Army, like the People's Temple, was a creation of the CIA. The SLA had at its core a clique of black ex-convicts from Vacaville Prison. Donald DeFreeze, otherwise known as "Cinque," led the SLA. He was formerly an informant for the LAPD's Criminal Conspiracy Section and the director of Vacaville's Black Cultural Association (BCA), a covert mind control unit with funding from the CIA channeled through SRI. The Menlo Park behavior modification specialists experimented with psychoactive drugs administered to members of the BCA. Black prisoners were programmed to murder selected black leaders once on the outside. The CIA/SRI zombie killer hit list included Oakland school superintendent Dr. Marcus Foster, and Panthers Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, among others. DeFreeze stated that at Vacaville in 1971-72, he was the subject of a CIA mind control experiment. He described his incarceration on the prison's third floor, where he was corralled by CIA agents who drugged him and said he would become the leader of a radical movement and kidnap a wealthy person. After his escape from Vacaville (an exit door was left unlocked for him), that's exactly what he did.

EM mind control machines were championed at SRI by Dr. Karl Pribram, director of the Neurophychology Research Laboratory: "I certainly could educate a child by putting an electrode in the lateral hypothalmus and then selecting the situations at which I stimulate it. In this was I can grossly change his behavior." Psychology Today touted Pribram as "The Magellan of Brain Science." He obtained his B.S. and M.D. degrees at the University of Chicago, and at SRI studied how the brain processes and stores sensory imagery. He is credited with discovering that mental imaging bears a close resemblance to hologram projection (the basis for transmitting images to the brains of test subjects under the misnomer "remote viewing"?). The SRI/SAIC psi experiments were supervised at Langley by John McMahon, second in command under William Casey, succeeding Bobby Ray Inman, the SAIC director. McMahon has, according to Philip Agee, the CIA whistle-blowing exile, an affinity for "technological exotics for CIA covert actions." He was recruited by the Agency after his graduation from Holy Cross College. He is a former director of the Technical Services Division, deputy director for Operations, and in 1982 McMahon was appointed deputy director of Central Intelligence. He left the Agency six years later to take the position of president of the Lockheed Missiles and Space Systems Group. In 1994 he moved on the Draper Laboratories. He is a director of the Defense Enterprise Fund and an adviser to congressional committees.

Many of the SRI "empaths" were mustered from L. Ron Hubbard's Church of Scientology, Harold Puthoff, the Institute's senior researcher, is a leading Scientologist. Two "remote viewers" from SRI have also held rank in the Church: Ingo Swann, a Class VII Operating Thetan, a founder of the Scientology Center in Los Angeles, and the late Pat Price. Puthoff and Targ's lab assistant was a Scientologist married to a minister of the church. When Swann joined SRI, he stated openly that fourteen "Clears" participated in the experiments, "more than I would suspect." At the time he denied CIA involvement, but now acknowledges, "it was rather common knowledge all along who the sponsor was, although in documents the identity of the Agency was concealed behind the sobriquet of 'an east-coast scientist.' The Agency's interest was quite extensive. A number of agents of the CIA came themselves ultimately to SRI to act as subjects in "remote viewing" experiments, as did some members of Congress."

Concrete evidence that electronic mind control was the true object of study at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) was exposed by the Washington Post in 1977. When the Navy awarded a contract to the Institute, "the scientific assistant to the Secretary of the Navy, Dr. Sam Koslov, received a routine briefing on various research projects, including SRI's. As the briefer flashed his chart onto the screen and began to speak, Koslov stormily interrupted, 'What the hell is that about?' Among the glowing words on the projected chart, the section describing SRI's work was labeled

'ELF and Mind Control.'

"'ELF' stands for 'extremely long frequency' electromagnetic waves, from the very slow brain frequencies up to about 100 cycles per second.... But the 'Mind Control' label really upset Koslov. He ordered the SRI investigations for the Navy stopped, and canceled another $35,000 in Navy funds slated for more remote viewing work." Contrary to Koslov's attempt to kill the research, the Navy quietly continued to fork out $100,000 for a two-year project directed by a bionics specialist. The "remote viewing" team at SRI was really engaged in projecting words and images directly to the cranium. It was not a humanitarian pastime: the project was military and test subjects are subjected to a lifetime of EM torture plied with the same thorough disregard for human rights as the radiation tests conducted at the height of the Cold War. To be sure, the treatment subjects have received at the hands of their own government would be considered atrocities if practiced in wartime.

Mind control was also used in domestic covert operations designed to further the CIA's heady ambitions, and during the Vietnam War period SRI was a hive of covert political subterfuge. The Symbionese Liberation Army, like the People's Temple, was a creation of the CIA. The SLA had at its core a clique of black ex-convicts from Vacaville Prison. Donald DeFreeze, otherwise known as "Cinque," led the SLA. He was formerly an informant for the LAPD's Criminal Conspiracy Section and the director of Vacaville's Black Cultural Association (BCA), a covert mind control unit with funding from the CIA channeled through SRI. The Menlo Park behavior modification specialists experimented with psychoactive drugs administered to members of the BCA. Black prisoners were programmed to murder selected black leaders once on the outside. The CIA/SRI zombie killer hit list included Oakland school superintendent Dr. Marcus Foster, and Panthers Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, among others. DeFreeze stated that at Vacaville in 1971-72, he was the subject of a CIA mind control experiment. He described his incarceration on the prison's third floor, where he was corralled by CIA agents who drugged him and said he would become the leader of a radical movement and kidnap a wealthy person. After his escape from Vacaville (an exit door was left unlocked for him), that's exactly what he did.

EM mind control machines were championed at SRI by Dr. Karl Pribram, director of the Neurophychology Research Laboratory: "I certainly could educate a child by putting an electrode in the lateral hypothalmus and then selecting the situations at which I stimulate it. In this was I can grossly change his behavior." Psychology Today touted Pribram as "The Magellan of Brain Science." He obtained his B.S. and M.D. degrees at the University of Chicago, and at SRI studied how the brain processes and stores sensory imagery. He is credited with discovering that mental imaging bears a close resemblance to hologram projection (the basis for transmitting images to the brains of test subjects under the misnomer "remote viewing"?). The SRI/SAIC psi experiments were supervised at Langley by John McMahon, second in command under William Casey, succeeding Bobby Ray Inman, the SAIC director. McMahon has, according to Philip Agee, the CIA whistle-blowing exile, an affinity for "technological exotics for CIA covert actions." He was recruited by the Agency after his graduation from Holy Cross College. He is a former director of the Technical Services Division, deputy director for Operations, and in 1982 McMahon was appointed deputy director of Central Intelligence. He left the Agency six years later to take the position of president of the Lockheed Missiles and Space Systems Group. In 1994 he moved on the Draper Laboratories. He is a director of the Defense Enterprise Fund and an adviser to congressional committees.

Many of the SRI "empaths" were mustered from L. Ron Hubbard's Church of Scientology, Harold Puthoff, the Institute's senior researcher, is a leading Scientologist. Two "remote viewers" from SRI have also held rank in the Church: Ingo Swann, a Class VII Operating Thetan, a founder of the Scientology Center in Los Angeles, and the late Pat Price. Puthoff and Targ's lab assistant was a Scientologist married to a minister of the church. When Swann joined SRI, he stated openly that fourteen "Clears" participated in the experiments, "more than I would suspect." At the time he denied CIA involvement, but now acknowledges, "it was rather common knowledge all along who the sponsor was, although in documents the identity of the Agency was concealed behind the sobriquet of 'an east-coast scientist.' The Agency's interest was quite extensive. A number of agents of the CIA came themselves ultimately to SRI to act as subjects in "remote viewing" experiments, as did some members of Congress."

[...] (Karl H. Pribram is an emeritus professor of psychology and psychiatry at Stanford University and Radford University. Board-certified as a neurosurgeon, Pribram did pioneering work on the definition of the limbic system, the relationship of the frontal cortex to the limbic system, the sensory-specific "association" cortex of the parietal and temporal lobes, and the classical motor cortex of the human brain.) Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions. Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions.

But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram’s holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm’s theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is “there” is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality? Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion. We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.

[...]

[...]

In 1973, what has come to be known as the Pribram-Bohm Holographic Model was non-existent. But the Seattle think tank, Organization for the Advancement of Knowledge (OAK), lead by Richard Alan Miller and Burt Webb were able to synthesize the work of Northrup and Burr on the electromagnetic nature of the human being with Dennis Gabor's work on optical holograms and come up with a new notion – a holographic paradigm. In "Languages of the Brain" (1971), Pribram had postulated that 2-dimensional interference patterns, physical holograms, underlie all thinking. The holographic component, for him, represented the associative mechanisms and contributed to memory retrieval and storage and problem solving.

[...]

That it is feasible to manipulate human behavior with the use of subliminal, either sound or visual, messages is now generally known. This is why in most of the countries the use of such technologies, without consent of the user, is banned. Devices using light for the stimulation of the brain show another way how the light flashing in certain frequencies could be used for the manipulation of human psychic life. As for the sound, a report on the device transmitting a beam of sound waves, which can hear only persons at whom the beam of sound waves is targeted, appeared last year in the world newspapers. The beam is formed by a combination of sound and ultrasound waves which causes that a person targeted by this beam hears the sound inside of his head. Such a perception could easily convince the human being that it is mentally ill. The acts presented in this article suggest that with the development of technology and knowledge of the functioning of human brain new ways of manipulation of human mind keep emerging. One of them seems to be the electromagnetic energy.

[...]

"Mommy and I are one" is a phrase that is claimed to be an effective subliminal message to aid in self motivation. The efficacy of complicated subliminal messages such as this is much disputed, however. The use of this phrase is propounded in a paper by Lloyd Silverman and Joel Weinberger in 1985, entitled "MOMMY AND I ARE ONE: Implications for psychotherapy", published in the American Psychologist. According the Silverman and Weinberger, this phrase works because "there are powerful unconscious wishes for a state of oneness with 'the good mother of early childhood' ... and gratification of these wishes can enhance adaptation." Silverman and Weinberger say that:

Neutral subliminal messages, such as "people are walking," have no effect on subjects.

Disturbing messages, such as "Destroy Mother," have a negative effect.

In areas where the usual term for mother is something different, such as "Mama" rather than "Mommy," the phrase "Mommy and I are one" has no effect.

Some follow-up work has claimed that in a game of darts, the phrase "It's OK to beat dad" improved scores.

There is strong supportive evidence for the efficacy of the MOMMY AND I ARE ONE message. Two meta-analyses were published in 1990 in major peer reviewed journals (Hardaway in Psychological Bulletin and Weinberger and Hardaway in Clinical Psychology Review). The results of these meta-analyses indicated that the message did yield reliable effects. The meta-analyses on MOMMY AND I ARE ONE indicated that the effects are reliable, of reasonable size, did not depend upon who conducted the study, and were unlikely to be a result of biased reporting of positive results. It appears that something is happening when this message is flashed.

This has been met with considerable skepticism in the scientific community. In general, subliminal messages have not found to have been effective. "Mommy and I are one" is a fairly complicated phrase that seems to require cognition to process, unlike a visceral image of bear or simply the word "enemy." A report from The Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice said:

Quote

Numerous studies had previously demonstrated semantic activation of single words under conditions in which subjects had no phenomenal awareness of the stimulus, as we noted in our reviews. However, no priming study had shown that multiple words, presented subliminally were capable of semantic activation... A recent study by Draine (1997) has cast considerable doubt on the proposition that multiple words presented subliminally can be comprehended. In his work, Draine established that priming effects of word pairs are a function of individual word meanings, rather than their combined meaning. For example, the pair of words "Not Dirty" was perceived to be evaluatively negative. The impact of the prime was uninfluenced by its negation. Draine concluded that two-word grammatical combinations are beyond the analytic powers of unconscious cognition. (see also Greenwald and Liu, 1985).

Additionally, there has not been much success in replicating these results, casting doubt on the validity of the initial studies.

An oft unexplored miracle in scripture is Jesus' calling of the 12. I'm amazed that the men left all to follow Jesus based on his call: "follow me."

"Follow me" makes sense. But it is what is missing from the call that makes the obedience of the disciples a miracle. Unlike a secular employer Jesus didn't make any promises. There was no offer of a minimum wage, bonus scheme, annual leave, death in service benefit and so on. There was just a simple two worded contract of "follow me."

To follow is a walk of faith.

Take Levi (aka. Matthew) for example, he was a tax collector employed by the Roman Governor, his job involved handling what would today be hundreds of thousands of pounds/dollars. Yet, Jesus called him while he was on the job, receiving and watching over tax payments. Jesus expected Levi to leave what he was doing and follow Him, and Levi did exactly that.

Such a walk of faith scares me.

That level of faith scares me. Don't get me wrong, I don't mean I'd never follow Jesus, but it is the kind of call that fills me with heart pounding, nerve racking adrenaline. It is such a BIG challenge. It's a, 'God only you can keep me through this' kind of challenge, totally outside of my Christian comfort zone. I think the scripture that best sums it up is Col. 3:1-2 "If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above... setting your mind on things on heaven, not on earth" (paraphrased).

True discipleship of Jesus Christ is about being prepared to turn our backs on everything we hold dear in pursuit of His presence. It calls for a total rejection of worldly ambitions, dreams, goals and so on. The 'follow me' of Jesus Christ asks us not just to put Him before our career, He is asking us to walk away from our career to follow Him (if necessary). Christianity is so much more than just church attendance, it is a radical challenge to change the way we live and think. If we are taking our faith seriously we should be a little scared about taking the next step in God, that is good because it means we are moving out of our comfort zones to "follow Him."

A subliminal message is communicated below the conscious level of perception. By nature, you will not be aware of receiving one. Backmasking, an audio technique in which sounds are recorded backwards onto a track that is meant to be played forwards, produces messages that sound like gibberish to the conscious mind. Gary Greenwald, a fundamentalist Christian preacher, claims that these messages can be heard subliminally, and can induce listeners towards, in the case of rock music, sex and drug use. However, this is not generally accepted as fact.

The manual for the popular sound program SoX pokes fun at subliminal messages. The description of the "reverse" option says "Included for finding satanic subliminals."

Following the 1950s subliminal message panic, many businesses have sprung up purporting to offer helpful subliminal audio tapes that supposedly improve the health of the listener. However, there is no evidence for the therapeutic effectiveness of such tapes.

Subliminal messages have also been known to appear in music. In the 1990s, two young men died from self-inflicted gunshots and their families were convinced it was because of a British rock band, Judas Priest. The families claimed subliminal messages told listeners to "do it" in the song "Better by You, Better Than Me". The case was taken to court and the families sought more than US$6 million in damages. The judge, Jerry Carr Whitehead, ruled that the subliminal messages did exist in the song, but stated that the families did not produce any scientific evidence that the song persuaded the young men to kill themselves. In turn, he ruled it probably would not have been perceived without the "power of suggestion" or the young men would not have done it unless they really intended to.

Subliminal messages can affect a human's emotional state and/or behaviors. They are most effective when perceived unconsciously. The most extensive study of therapeutic effects from audiotapes was conducted to see if the self-esteem audiotapes would raise self-esteem. 237 volunteers were provided with tapes of 3 manufacturers and completed post tests after one month of use. The study showed clearly that subliminal audiotapes made to boost self-esteem did not produce effects associated with subliminal content within one month's use. The effectiveness of any subliminal message has been called into question time after time and has led many to one conclusion, namely: that the technique does not work, as Anthony R. Pratkanis, one of the researchers in the field puts it: "It appears that, despite the claims in books and newspapers and on the backs of subliminal self help tapes, subliminal-influence tactics have not been demonstrated to be effective. Of course, as with anything scientific, it may be that someday, somehow, someone will develop a subliminal technique that may work, just as someday a chemist may find a way to transmute lead to gold. I am personally not purchasing lead futures on this hope however."